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Snipping Leaves

jimscott

Tropical Fish Enthusiast
Does anybody snip part of the leaves of plants with long leaves, when taking leaf cuttings, preserving the basal part?
 
Yes. Reducing leaf size reduces transpiration and the chance that your cutting will dry out.
 
That and the leaf doesn't flop over and fall out of the pot...
 
I haven't ever intentionally snipped the tips of leaf blades free of their petioles/bases. I have, however, had some that broke off during manipulations, like repotting. I then attempted to induce plantlet formation, like ordinary leaf-pullings. Though some were able to produce plantlets, it seemed that they had more difficulty doing so.

For larger leaved Pinguicula, I simply take the majority of leaf-pullings while the plants and their leaves are more numerous and smaller. If I start a few plantlets on large mature leaves, of, for example, Pinguicula gigantea. I let those plantlets grow until the parent leaf has completely dried up and died, then I make sure I place those small plantlets, in a small empty plastic tray, move the tray into good light and frequently spritz the leaves with weak fertilizer. Once they have the desired quantity of small leaves, I remove all but the newest two or three leaves, treat the small leaf-pullings like any others I'm propagating with, I can then either pot up the remaining little plantlets, to be grown into additional adult plants, and use some of the new batch of plantlets to repeat the process. If you do this, you will soon see that even when beginning with only a single individual of any particular variety, you can soon have extremely large quantities divided, propagated, and growing.

In the late 1990's, I began reintroducing myself to Mexican/equatorial Pinguicula. It had been more than a decade since I last grew any. Someone in northern California traded with me, and I obtained a Pinguicula rotundiflora and a Pinguicula 'Sethos' in that trade. I grew the P. 'Sethos' sealed in a ziploc bag, with LFS and clipped to the fluorescent light reflector. At the time, my growing technique for these plants was very weak. Though the P. 'Sethos' did very well, the P. rotundiflora barely survived. I was able to propagate it via leaf-pullings, but the parent plant and the leaf-pullings, remained no larger than the tip of a pencil eraser. They were also very pale, almost white. Eventually I tried feeding them with a small amount of dried tubifex worm powder dusted onto the leaves - bingo, the failing plants suddenly turned green and began doubling in size, every few days.
 
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I took a couple long-leafed P. gigantea leaves and had them flopping into adjacent pots. They both sprouted. I was hoping to save space and get a bunch of truncated leave into one pot.
 
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